1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a database system, and particularly to a database system constructed with a plurality of database storage subsystems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computers play a crucial role in today's business environments. Take a computing system in a bank, for example. Most business transactions are conducted through the online services provided by the bank's computing system, and their records are collected and processed by some appropriate accounting programs at predetermined intervals (e.g., on a daily basis). A conventional way to achieve this is to stop the online services temporarily and allow the accounting system to make full access to the business databases. Such business computing systems must also provide high availability. To this end, backup-taking tasks should be included in their daily maintenance activities, protecting the system against the potential risk of hardware failures. Regular backup enables quick recovery of the database in the event of a system failure.
In recent years, it is not unusual for banks to offer their online services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The provision of such nonstop services, however, poses various difficulties in the operations and maintenance of bank computing systems. One of the biggest problem in this new environment is that computing systems have no chance to stop their main services for the purpose of time-consuming daily accounting and backup operations. That is, there is a need for an improved processing mechanism that enables regular accounting and backup tasks to be made without interrupting online facilities for the customers.